This latest book by Marina Warner is an investigation of fear,
horror and terror. It is an exploration of the different histories
and contexts of representations of ‘bogeymen’. Encompassing ritual
festival activity such as takes place on the Mexican day of the
Dead, through the engravings of William Hogarth, to modern children’s
fiction, Warner links and compares the recurring symbols of madness
and monsters that have always played such a major part of human
cultural life. Drawing on anthropology, psychology, history and
the arts, Warner teases out the secret desires behind such fears,
and reveals how they recur and then disappear in different climates.
Warner is also interested in humour, and how it can be used to
either soothe or exacerbate fear. She raises many questions of
our continuing fascination and delight with the macabre, the enjoyment
that both children and adults take in this subject matter.
The scope of this book is enormous, and makes it a volume to keep
and refer to, and dip in and out of at leisure. It is full of
illustrations, including colour prints of Hieronymus Bosch and
Goya, and photographs of events and animals. It is a book that
anyone attempting any kind of research into these themes will
find extremely useful. It is a also a book for anyone who secretly
loves a good horror story or film, as it will provide all the
academic argument and historical context for you to justify wanting
to watch the ‘X-files’ or ‘Scream:5’
The book is divided into themed sections,(scaring, lulling, and
making mock) and these contain chapters where a particular notion,
such as cannibalism, is explored. These are extremely densely
written passages, and in ‘My Father He Ate Me…’ Warner links
the legend of Kronos, the Greek god who ate his children, to Roald
Dahl’s BFG, and his tales of scary dreams of this very act. She
looks at the way the gender of the parent who eats can affect
the meaning of these tales, and the prevalence of these stories
at different times. Of the ogre who eats children, she concludes
that ‘his wicked folly makes plain the social and human imperative
that the young must be allowed to thrive and grow’.
These passages of erudite research are interspersed with ‘reflections’,
where a particular event, or series of paintings is analysed in
minute detail. These reflections are compelling reading, and provide
examples of the intensity of the imagery of horror and it’s different
aspects. In her reflection on the Patum of Berga, a ritualised
feast day celebrated in Spain, she describes the elaborate festivities,
the masks and costumes and dancing, and compares this sort of
‘participatory event’ to attendance at a rock concert: ‘Coming
out of such ordeals alive delivers a ‘hit’, the high of surviving,
it defines the living, impervious, sovereign self, and becomes
a cause for ecstatic release.’
Much of that which Warner extracts from the history of the terrifying
and weird, can, she argues, be found to resonate through modern
culture. The recent portrait of Myra Hindley, displayed in the
Sensation exhibition was made up of a four year-old’s hand-prints
and provoked much public disgust. Warner points out however that
‘in the sixteenth century, Arcimboldo pieced together a profile
of Herod from the naked bodies of the holy innocents’
Warner goes on to look at many other terrors and their images,
finding similarities between Medusa’s lolling tongue and that
of the Irish Sheela-na-gig, presenting many different dragons
and their portraits, and comparing the many representations of
hell throughout the ages. From the ancient Greeks to ‘Men in Black’,
it seems that there is very little that can have escaped the scope
of this study. This is a rich and interesting book, that could
be the starting point for many a new obsession or research project.
It is an ambitious project, and one that Warner achieves with
consummate skill. My only real criticism is that this hard-back
edition is too bulky to read under the covers, and what better
time to read it than after banishing the monsters from under your
bed?
Reviewed by Rachel O’Riordan
